I bought one of these because I visited someone who had one. They used it to voice control the lights, and if you wanted to listen to a song you’d just say 'Alexa play (song name) on Spotify.
They’d say you had to mention on Spotify to get the song.
So now I have one, but I think to get an entire song I have to request it on Spotify. Is that true? Spotify premium is $10/month, I don’t know if I want this feature that bad.
I’m not at home right now so I can’t toy with it, but do any other services offer full songs on Alexa?
Prime music, Pandora, I heart radio, etc. Will these do it?
Looking online, will Amazon music unlimited ($3.99 a month) do the same thing?
My music library is about half a terabyte so I don’t want to upload that to Amazon. Plus mine doesn’t have a lot of new songs or albums.
If you have Prime you have a ton of music available to you already included, that doesn’t require Amazon Music Unlimited. It’s definitely not as big a library as Spotify but there is a lot.
I’ve been buying my music from Amazon for a while, so I was lucky when Echo came out I had everything I’d ever bought from them available to stream.
You can only upload I think 250 songs to have available to stream. Those would be songs that you didn’t buy on Amazon and ones that aren’t available to stream for free. I’ve uploaded about 100 of my favorites.
Check out what’s available on Amazon Prime for free, first, before you spend money on an extra service. You can put music in your library and make playlists. If you don’t put a song in your library but it happens to be free, your Dot will play it if you ask for it.
You might find that the free library is enough for you without adding the extra service.
ETA: Oh, also, Pandora is free but it’s not a service that will let you bring up any song you want. You can get an account for free and connect it to your Dot and see what it does. Also, your Dot will play podcasts for free. And some radio stations…the other day I randomly asked Echo to play NPR and it tuned right in to my local NPR station.
You can import way more than that (up to 250,000), if you’re willing to pay $24.99/year for the privilege.
You can also stream to the Dot through bluetooth, so if you have all the songs saved on your phone or other bluetooth-enabled device, you don’t have to go through the internet.